Professor Lucy Easthope, emergency planner

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:34Thank you.

1:04attacks, pandemics and fires. Cataclysms like these comprise her working life. She's been involved in the response to many of the most significant disasters costing British lives from 9-11 onwards, including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 7-7 bombings, the Manchester Arena attack and the COVID-19 pandemic. She was born and raised in Merseyside and cites watching the 1989 Hillsborough disaster unfold on television when she was 10 as the spur for her career. Why is no one helping? She asked her father, the first of many difficult questions she would pose as she pursued her calling. She's the visiting professor of mass fatalities and pandemics at the University of Bath.

1:46She says the hardest part of working in disaster is going home. Professor Lucy Easthope, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you for having me. So Lucy, let's start with that quote from you then. The hardest part is going home. why exactly? I think people assume that the most difficult things will be the things you see at the scene or the time spent in the aftermath but for me the hardest thing has always been separating coming away from that and having in many ways to sort of reintegrate back into society and walk through the front door and that line has always just summed up how I feel about that you inhabit two worlds and home can seem a very very strange place it's not the disasters that often seem strange to me how do you do that then how do you kind of decompress you have to really learn to do it and if you don't do it one of the things that I learned very early on was that you cost yourself relationships you become very frustrated with the mundanity of life because you think you've seen something so much more important and so much worse and actually that makes you really difficult to live with.

2:56So one of the things that I was very very very grateful for early on was training actually from colleagues who'd walked the path before me who had learnt the hard way. They'd really been very difficult to live with. So what's an average day for you if there is one? Usually at any one time both kind of in the brain and on the laptop there are multiple tabs open. There'll be a current incident going on, something that's recently happened where they're asking for advice right now. There might be a trip being arranged to go to a scene or to a mortuary or to where we are keeping safe the personal effects.

3:32There'll be another tab open which is an incident perhaps six, seven months old and people are getting very weary and exhausted and they're looking for new ways of thinking about it. There'll be training, so I'll be perhaps heading off to train places to be ready. Again, very hidden work, so I've just come back from training for people who are ready to go in the event of a major incident into assistance centres where people would be taken if something happened. And then there's those reviews, two, three years on, of whether we're doing the right thing, whether the plans are good enough, and that feeds into new plans.

4:07Other days of the week are all consuming Perhaps you're visiting the mortuary or the scene But the particular place where my passion is particularly Is to spend time with the personal effects from a disaster And why is that your passion? You've described that as almost a spiritual experience for you When I started working in this field The personal effects had only just started being protected There was some new legislation in America to protect the items recovered from things like air disasters and bomb explosions. They were just starting to develop what I've called in my writing an ethic of care around them.

4:45But still, if you didn't get there early enough, they would go into bins and skips. And for a lot of the kinds of incidents that I was working on, there would not be a body to return or a whole body to return, but there would be what I've called the furniture of self from the wonderful Kai Erickson, a disaster sociologist. and these are the things that make us us they're on us they're in our bags they're in our homes and then as i moved into the 2000s only certain types of personal effects got protection so an air crash the airline would pay for it but in a flood all of your life's hoard just went in the skip and these became some something that i i knew needed to be treasured because what i would see is communities couldn't come back without them they needed their furniture of self they needed their photographs their war medals their certificates it's a loss in the soul i think a lot of my work has been about losses of soul losses in the soul that are irreparable but there are some things we can do to say you know i still have that and one of the great things now about my work is getting to a scene and somebody has read something that I have written and they have stopped the personal effects going into a skip and therefore landfill.

6:04And that is a tangible difference from, say, when I started out 25 years ago. Well, it's so connected to the very heart of this programme, the idea behind it. Starting again, leaving behind everything. Who are you if you're cast away? There's a lot to talk about today Lucy but also your music of course and I know that music helps you manage your emotions while you're working. You actually have a playlist of planthams. We're going into your first disc. Is this one of them? This most certainly is the most important one of them yes. So tell me about what constitutes a plantham. How does it work? It's music that readies you.

6:42It's music that separates you from the world you're about to leave and the world you're about to go into. So the beat goes into my body and stabilises what is quite a wobbly core. It strengthens me, it plants both feet on the ground, and then I'm ready to go in. Some of my coping strategies for work I've been taught, and some of them are staples in trauma management and disaster management, and other ones I taught myself, and one of them was the value of music with a deep beat that goes right within me. So this is Lose Yourself by Eminem. Just let it slip Yo

7:47Eminem and Lose Yourself. So Lucy Eastop, let's go back to the beginning. You were born in Liverpool in 1978 to Anne and Bob, both teachers. Let's start with your mum, Anne. Tell me about her. Oh, she's wonderful. She is this pocket rocket of talent and incredible linguist in French and German. She was very keen for us, myself and my little sister, to take advantage of opportunity and of the world. Tell me a little bit about your dad then. So Bob, mum was a language teacher. He was a woodwork teacher. He was woodwork, metalwork and car maintenance. And he was very good with his hands. And then both of them had got teaching positions at the wonderful West Derby School for Boys.

8:39in Liverpool and my mum had a puppy and she was throwing sticks for it and she accidentally threw her car keys into the lake and my dad fashioned a contraption to retrieve the keys and a courtship blossomed from there. Oh I love that. Were his skills as a craftsman evident at home I'm imagining you must have been growing up around his projects. He's everywhere. Doors and ledges and benches and He made some doors for a couple of churches in Liverpool and gates for nursery schools. His favourite wood was oak. But of course, the other thing that he did was he was where the scallywags would be sent at the end of the day.

9:18He would be sent, if somebody had been messing about in maths, they would go and hang out with Dad in the woodwork and metalwork workshop and they'd make something. And was he good with those kids? He was brilliant. Time, patience. It meant that when we went out in Birkenhead and in Liverpool, the scariest looking youths would be, you know, coming out, all right, sir. And he did something quite, quite unusual for the time. So this is the 80s. My mum became a teacher full time and my dad was at home with us, with the Sherpa van, with our Jack Russell in it. And he would go to building jobs in the day, but he would be there at three o 'clock to pick us up.

9:57you know never made a profit really with the business because he was so generous and he was a sucker for particularly kind elderly old ladies who would say oh I haven't got much but could you do my my bathroom and he'd make a terrible loss doing their bathroom and then in our early teens he was diagnosed with a very severe form of arthritis ankylosing spondylitis and it started to take his physicality couldn't move he couldn't get down to do the you know somebody's joinery work on the floor or or mend a radiator or any of those sorts of things and it started to take his hands so he went back to teaching and a second renaissance really there are now lads 10 15 years after his first time teaching who were hugely influenced by him you know every plumber knew my Every tradesman knew my dad.

10:49Every builder's merchant knew my dad. But he was becoming more and more immobile and also in pain. He went part time and then eventually he retired early. Let's have some more music, Lucy East Hope. Your second choice today. What are we going to hear? Well, this is for him. This is for Daddy Bob, Lord of all hopefulness. and it's because of being teachers you have that constant exposure to the assembly banger you're constantly in and he would sing them off key at least one octave too low and there was only ever going to be one song for him and it is this one the line strong hands on the plane and the lathe that's the one that will always just typify him really.

12:32Lord of all hopefulness sung by the choir of Queen's College, Cambridge, conducted by James Weeks and Matthew Stainer on the organ. So Lucy Easthope, you said that you define yourself as the daughter of two teachers. So what kind of pupil were you back then at school? I really struggled with being a child. I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to ask the difficult questions. You do your necessary three or four lessons on Anne Frank, but I'd want to know so much more behind the scenes or I'd want to worry about whatever was in the news and talk about that to my teacher. So I think I was quite an intense pupil.

13:13It was allowed at home but not at school. Not at school so much. The 1989 Hillsborough disaster was a defining moment for the region during your childhood. There were kids that went to your school at the match. What are your memories of the tragedy? They were in my class. There were boys who were at the match and both my mum and dad had pupils at the match. The kids in your class, they got home safely they were traumatised by what they'd seen and experienced obviously but they made it out I think our class changed that day with very little support at the time 2025 all kinds of interventions would have come into that school but at the time there was very little support And for you Lucy, that day, the day it happened you were at home with your dad watching the news what did you see and what was your response to it?

14:03Dad could be very, very dramatic and very, very scouse when he was alarmed and he had a tea tray and he sort of threw it down and he called for my mum. And they were both sort of trying to, they were watching the television and they were trying to make sense of it. As the coverage became much more negative to the fans over the next few days, my dad became more and more agitated. and one of the phrases that I remember him saying was, you know, somebody needs to sort this and he was angry that the fans were being vilified and I took that as a direction, I think, and that's the line that I always remember him saying.

14:42And he would take me to see on the way to visit my gran who was in Wavertree, the protests against the Sun newspaper and he'd beep his horn in support. And Lucy, what lessons have you taken from that experience? watching Hillsborough and, you know, the unfolding response to it into your professional life now? It's with me every single day. And one of the things that's hardest to compute sometimes is that sometimes the initial event, terrible as it may be, isn't the worst thing. Sometimes the responders and the response is worse than the first event. And that is a profound thing and that is something that it can make you have a lot of enemies because people think that you're going to be united against the one common thing and actually you're pointing out to responders that they're doing something really unhelpful or they're really making things worse or they are leaning into as we saw with with the aftermath of hillsborough they're leaning into a lie and in 1995 Hillsborough the incredible drama documentary had been produced by Jimmy McGovern the playwright and what that shone a further light on which was how the families were treated with regard to things like the care of their deceased having to view multiple polaroids having to attend a gymnasium the tea urn had a sign on it that said for police only and that that was when I also knew I wanted to change that that I understood that sometimes something might happen but that the afterwards we could do so much better and so one of things I get into trouble for quite a lot is I'll leap from very strategic planning and very strategic thinking to where's the tea urn for everybody but the little things in moments of crisis they are sometimes all that you've got aren't they they're everything and from the minute something happens the families and those affected they're on this high alert looking for signs that they can trust you and most importantly often looking for signs that they can trust you with the body of their loved one and if they get there and it's chaos and if they get there and your people are rude to them and there's no warm drinks and no comfort you can watch the the trust and the hope fade out of them and that is something that I try and instil in all of those responding that the faith that they put in us that moment we have to try and honour.

17:26Lucy, we've got to make room for the music too and I really want to hear this third disc. What's it going to be? It's the music from the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. This was so important to me and my sister. there were six or seven big clunky VHSs that we put into the machine and on a weekend we rotated the classics of the 80s back to the future Willow the Goonies and my personal favorite was Robin Hood Prince of Thieves Kevin Costner Alan Rickman and that was something we would do together and then later some of my happiest teen young person memories are being in the wonderful Wirral School's concert band.

18:10And I really struggled with the rapid playing of a clarinet, but I was allowed a bass clarinet, and I would hit that low G or that low D and hold it. And the joy, this music was the music of younger childhood and then later the music of a concert, and we once performed this for the Queen. So this is a very special track to me and my sister.

18:54¶¶

19:09The overture from the soundtrack to Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, composed and conducted by Michael Kamen and performed by the Greater Los Angeles Orchestra.

19:21Lucy Easthope, you went on to Bristol University after school to study law. What was your goal back then? Was it to be a lawyer? no so I've been to my career as teachers with all of these things that I wanted to do around changing the world and particularly very specifically improving things for families after disaster and the suggestion was that I should study geography because there was the early burgeoning of various geography specialism degrees where you could do disaster management I said no it's it's not that sort of disaster management and also for me geography seemed to involve a lot of standing in rivers in North Wales and floating oranges down.

20:01I was struggling with maths and sciences and things. But I like to speak and I like to advocate. And one of the things that I still hopefully do today is I don't need to like somebody or agree with somebody to completely defend them. One of the best decisions ever in my life was to go to Birkenhead Sixth Form College. If somebody had a problem, I was often speaking for them. I became vice president of the National Union of Students at the college. And so there was this sort of suggestion of advocacy as a way forward. Yeah, activism almost. Activism. And off I went to do law. Everybody was going for the big magic circle firms and everybody was going for training schemes.

20:43And I went to intern for the wonderful Professor Phil Scraton, who was then advocating at the Centre for Crime and Social justice for the Hillsborough families. After university, you got a gig as a TV researcher, and I think you were unique in that you were the only person working there who didn't want to be in TV. So how did you transition out of doing that to jumping into what you do now? Things like Big Brother were new then, so everybody was trying to get the roles on that. And I was saving up to go to disaster conferences. And particularly, I was very, very blessed to be invited to conferences with the wonderful organisation Disaster Action, which was a group of bereaved and survivors of these iconic disasters, Hillsborough, the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Martianess disaster, Piper Alpha.

21:35I was working as a researcher in the day and then studying for a master's degree in disaster management at night. So it was always there, I was going to do this. So Lucy, you got your first job in disaster recovery, working on the aftermath of 9-11. Tell me about that. What were you actually doing? So I was working for a private firm that mobilises when the worst happens and what it allows governments and airlines and ministries of defence to do is not keep a constant standing contract ready for disaster. It doesn't have to have all the kit, it can hire somebody in and for September the 11th they had been hired to provide additional support for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York.

22:18And what they needed was personnel. So I came on board in 2002 to manage a British team that would be constantly rotated, working with the human remains and the personal effects at Ground Zero. Lucy, you've written that I am the collector of a very specific type of story and the keeper of a very particular type of secret sorrow. Tell me about that. Why secret sorrow? I would go from disaster to disaster. I did 13 mass fatality responses in two years for that particular private contractor. The thing I find I think most interesting and most difficult often about the personal effects, I find it much more intimate than working with the body of the deceased.

23:05the personal effects I feel I always start with an apology it's such a violation and obviously there's codes of practice and ways that we work but it's a really intimate thing do you literally make an apology you kind of say to the person in my head I say I'm really sorry to have to go into here I'm into this bag and I'm sorry that this happened to you you get to know the person in a way that they never intended for you to get to know them. Lisey it's time for your next piece of music. Disc number four. What have you chosen? This is Tender by Blur and for many years I would get quite frustrated.

23:44I'd fallen very very very hard in love with Tom but I'd grown up in Birkenhead in the 80s where love was demonstrated with big hallmark teddies and big fluffy cards on Valentine's Day. I'd found this man who was not incredibly demonstrative and certainly not incredibly vocal about how he felt and then eventually one day he said that our love song is tender and he plays it constantly and he loves it and I hadn't realised that he was playing it to me and for me so this has to be on there.

24:29Tender is the night Crying by your side Tender is the touch Of someone that you love too much Tender is the day The demons go away Lord, I need to find Someone who can heal my mind Come on, come on, come on Get through it Blur and tender for your now husband Tom. You two eloped in 2007, I think, Lucy, to get married. Where did you go? We went to New York and it was just brilliant. So we got married in the town hall and then we went across to the public library, it's in Ghostbusters, the big lions, and emailed everybody to tell them. But the best thing about the wedding, obviously the very best thing was marrying each other.

25:29But the second best thing was that there is a convention when you get married at New York City Hall that the people in front of you in the queue for their license act as your witnesses if you have eloped. Tom's favourite film is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And the two people in front of us in the queue were the actors Alan Ruck and Mireille Enos. so they were our witnesses who were in the film yeah i mean alan ruck was cameron so more recently has become very famous for succession one of the flaws of that day is we only actually have pictures of alan ruck and me rainos with one of us he is on our marriage certificate he and his his now wife signed our marriage certificate how much are you able to tell tom about what you do and share with him?

26:22Has that changed over the years? In the early parts of my career, I brought nothing home. So Tom was a young airline pilot and I was responding to air crashes. And what I had learned was it takes a huge amount of courage and strength of will and mind to fly a plane as well as all the technical abilities you have to be very certain that you can do this and I felt this huge responsibility to not bring my work home he never asked me not to and it wasn't part of our life which sounds strange I would go off and do my work I'd deploy you might not see me I would come back and I would have a shower and that sounds strange but the one time I didn't he said why do you smell of kerosene and it was because I'd just come from a helicopter to crash and then we would just have this life that was away from it.

27:22Lucy I want to take you back to 2002. Late that year you were part of a team planning a temporary mortuary at Brides Norton for the military action in Iraq which was about to start. So you were doing that but you were working alongside military personnel who were about to be deployed. Were you able to balance their anxieties what they were going through with getting the job done no no I wasn't and one day I made a mistake which was that we were preparing for the very first it was going to be a televised repatriation royals would be in attendance and my team which was 16 funeral directors in full tales who would bring the coffins in after the the military removal from the Hercules hadn't eaten and I took them in for breakfast into the main canteen at Bryce Norton and the room was full of young men and women about to deploy and it just washed over me what I had just done and there were a number of lessons taken from that one is to always think about how I will feed my team and I and I often look very obsessed when a plan comes in and I say you know there's no plan here for how to feed that team or how to shower that team and then a second thing that reinforced for me that day which I use pretty much every day of my working life now is to think about how things will be perceived and seen by those around them and that little things matter and it's going back to that view of being able to trust but also the very very courageous men and women about to deploy really did not need to see that right then.

29:08What was their reaction Lucy? Was it just a case of everything going quiet? Yes busy naffy you know all that crockery and cutlery and eggs and bacon and it just went completely deathly silent and utter horror on people's faces. I mean it was so dramatic. It was like a film. You know, I marched in 16 funeral directors in full garb. It was, it was, it was a sort of horrific flash mob. It was just awful. And those sort of moments now, often I'll say something and a detective will say to me, you know, you're overthinking this, or you're worrying too much. But that was a very, a very hard lesson to learn very early on.

29:51So Lucy, once the military action actually began, you were then in charge of repatriating soldiers who died and their belongings. What kinds of things were you doing to protect and preserve these items? You've told us how important it is to do that and how much they matter to you. What kind of duties of care are we talking? So the American and UK forces would get their soldiers out of the initial theatre of battle and into Bryce Norton. And then our job was to very much in the background prepare for things like the family assistance the family viewing of the deceased and actually in the first few repatriations they weren't supposed to have any personal items on their body apart from their dog tags but they had put letters from home in a couple of cases in their underwear and that was being thrown out and there were other letters from home in some of the small bags that came back with them and the letters the original plan was it was that they would go in the bin and myself and a couple of colleagues asked if we could prepare the letters to be returned to the families how did you do that we sanitize them as best as possible sometimes they had blood on them and then we would sit and very on a very low setting dry them out with a low setting on a hairdryer and then the military said that we could return them but only if they were laminated which filled me with horror from a practical level as well because I knew that would mean I'd have to try and use the laminator and I would mess it up and I'd put the pouch in wrong but a colleague stepped in and we laminated them and I had very mixed feelings about that I thought you know these widows don't want a laminated letter they want the letter that his hands has been on but actually I learned something there which was now I still see some of those women talk about the letters in documentaries it's you know 20 years on and they hold them and I don't know that they would have survived without that protection so you learn a lot through extremis I think sometimes.

32:01Lucy it's time to go to your next piece of music your fifth choice today what are you taking to the island next and why? The wonderful pink has got me through so many difficult times. She's very, very well represented on the Plathums and Trust Fall felt like the right song to take with me to remind me that it's all worth fighting for and whatever I see I'm never cynical. I'm an optimist and I'm very hopeful and this felt like that needed to be on my island with me for what I'm going to face there. Are we running out of time? Are we hiding from the light? Are we just too scared to fight for what we want tonight?

32:55Close your eyes and leave us all behind. But our love is on our side. It's a trustful baby. It's a trustful baby. Pink and trustful. So Professor Lucy Eastope, you were studying for a PhD alongside working in disaster planning and recovery and your thesis was looking at the impact on those living in the village of Tollbar in South Yorkshire. It was flooded in 2007. What were your key findings? I found the most incredible community there and it also did teach me that the plan has value. One of the problems we have in emergency planning is that plans are, despite being the core tenet of what we do, people are quite disparaging.

33:47There's always, you know, the plan won't survive contact with the enemy. It means it won't survive the incident. But actually, I realised the plan does something, even if all it does is make sure that the community can find a way to access an income stream or find a way to access some support. And so it wasn't a negative thesis about we're not getting anything right in in the way we respond to disaster it reinforced for me very operational points like the meaning of a life scape how a community is built on places and spaces it also reinforced for me the work there's a whole chapter in the thesis on by the time I was studying in in Tollbar flooding personal effects and flooding loss of home were really the neglected aspect of disaster management.

34:37Explosions, crowd crush, plane crash, you would get support for things like the loss of your personal effects. But with a flood, the one thing that would happen is the skips would be delivered to the bottom of the road. How much emphasis do you place on mental health support in emergency planning, both for survivors but also responders? In my work, in some of the incidents where psychological care has been so poor and consideration of rest and self-care has been so poor I have seen very very high levels of attrition rate so the workers have never worked again or they've never worked in the field again I've seen people as I say we call it going pop so completely losing control or becoming very very distressed or very very angry that's a very well-known phenomenon in our field because the stress is cumulative so people will get very very distressed my biggest fear now was none of this really was carried into the pandemic for health care workers and for mortuary workers they weren't supported from the start they weren't allowed to really think of this as as a global disaster they were now disaster responders and one of the hardest things is to try and fix it too late so i do a lot of health care events now and sometimes the room it's almost spiritual when you say to them this is what we would expect to see and they are relieved they've been personalizing this trauma or you speak to their partners and their children and they say you know mum was great she was a frontline responder in the pandemic but we feel like we've lost her ever since we didn't provide health care workers with that kind of support and knowledge it's not that I was given it I had to I was told to seek it by by American colleagues and American psychologists and I procured it for myself and that's really relevant.